Kierkegaard on the Ethics of Nonconformity

We live in an age of distrust, unrest, conflict of values, and, to a significant degree, atomization. In such a time, everyone is a critic. It is extremely common to inveigh against corrupt elites, Incompetent institutions, and bad leaders. Nor is such criticism necessarily uncommonly justified.
And yet in our everyday lives, we must submit to the authority of a large number of institutional settings, and unless we are to become completely cynical in our dealings with the world, this situation of unrest, of disharmony between personal judgment and public obligation, is likely to produce a peculiar type of cognitive dissonance.
Reconciling this dissonance in a way that preserves our integrity may be a quite difficult matter. Indeed, we are up against the problem of conformity and nonconformity, and of the extraordinary person, of what responsibility lies on the person who believes they have a radical and just critique of some institutional setting that is pervasive in their society.
Because such a situation is peculiarly typical of our civilization, we may justly hope to turn to modern Philosophy for help in understanding this problem. And perhaps no modern philosopher thought more about the conflict between the individual and institutional settings than that most Protestant of the great philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard.
A critic both of the fashionable liberal Hegelianism of his time, the state church of Denmark, and of the bourgeois press, sensitive to a feeling that his age was spiritually decrepit and lacked appropriate seriousness and capacities for commitment, Kierkegaard was particularly sensitive to the question of what it means to rebel against corrupt societal norms in a truly authentic way.
After having been made into laughing stock by the Danish press, after the famed corsair affair (which we studied a few months ago), this responsibility of the single individual was particularly sharpened for Kierkegaard. And it came home to him, with the greatest force, when he became acquainted with the works of a pastor, Adolph Peter Adler, who, repulsed by the Hegelianism and rationalism of current theological sentiment, and under the influence of a religious experience, declared he had received a revelation from God concerning the limitations of rational thought and the need for passionate commitment to the revelation present in scriptures. In the course of a few years, Adler was suspended from his post in the church of Denmark and recanted his claim that he had received a revelation, instead suggesting that his work was a mere expression of genius.
There was no doubt that Kierkegaard saw something of himself in Adler, but also realized in Adler a fundamental moral failure that made his desire to fight against modern social corruption, vitiated with the same spiritual confusions of the time.
As a result, Kierkegaard was peculiarly stimulated by these incidents and began, carefully meditating on the limitations and confusions inherent in Adler’s claims on one hand, and more generally, the peculiar moral responsibility of the radical critic within society on the other..
The conclusion he characteristically came to, is that the critic's primary responsibility is not to influence society directly but to maintain the authenticity and truthfulness of their critique. What corrupted Adler and many a social critic, and what Kierkegaard wished to avoid at all cost, was becoming a critic who, in their desire for social acclaim and social reward, contradicted their message in the format in which it is expressed.
In a way, strikingly analogous to his early analysis of the religious life, Kierkegaard argues that the critic must operate with fear and trembling, with no external social supports, but only with the internal confidence that is maintained in its purity by their sacrifice of status and prestige. Such integrity is the true measure of the power of their point of view, and in working out the rigorous requirements of such a cultivation of integrity, Kierkegaard made a permanent contribution to the study of the ethics of non-conformity. In this meetup, we wish to explore this contribution by examining an important chapter from Kierkegaard's unpublished book on Adler. Reading is linked here.